Photograph’s from a recent trip to Hawaii’s Big Island. This island is one of only five places on earth where you can currently see active volcanoes with lava lakes. Destruction and creation of life and land can be witnesses day after day on this beautiful island.

Below are some photographs from a recent trip to the famous Yosemite National Park in the Californian Sierra Nevada mountains.

Since I moved to California I had the idea of engaging more in landscape photography since the western part of the United States provides a vast amount of beauty to be explored and framed into images. For this specifically I was able to test a new DSLR and high quality lens. This was also a great opportunity to explore editing photographs based on raw files. We had terrific days of hiking and the photographic opportunities were seemingly endless.

Back home while narrowing down a selection of strongest images I ended up with a gallery of 11 pictures. Looking at all of them at once, it is striking how different they are in style, color, and lighting. In the end it all works together though because the imagery of this gallery just shows some of the diversity and the many faces of an exceptional national park.

My biggest fascination of all is how plants and trees are able to grow on ground, granite and mountains that look hostile for life. Nature always finds a way.

The photograph you can see below was taken while casually strolling down by myself towards the Fields Museum on a Sunday morning in Chicago. Its one of these side of the road pictures that I have come to enjoy more over time but cannot quite pinpoint why.

The rails above the street are part of Chicago’s famous public transport system called “the L” which is basically a subway that is mostly overground in the down town area. As the author of the picture, it is challenging to dissociate the graphical and compository quality of this picture with the emotions of this wonderful holiday. It shows a moment of peace and serenity with time for introversion which I don’t often get to have. I will post a gallery of several of these sort of pictures in the future.

Right above use at every instant of our lives there is something breathtakingly gorgeous that is sure to appeal to anyone no matter the age or cultural background. Yet we can hardly every appreciate it in its full beauty.

I have recently spent a few weeks in Australia. It was my first experience in the area and I wished to see some of the famous landscapes that central Australia is known for, such as Uluru (Ayers Rock). All of what I saw during daytime was wonderful but it was after sunset that the greatest thing of all came to shine: starlight across the horizon as I had never seen it before.

On the second night of camping I took the long exposure photograph you see below. It took the camera thirty seconds to capture what your naked eyes can marvel at constantly. The campfire that shines brightly in this picture was almost extinct and two of my fellow travellers where chatting well beyond midnight. At least a hundred kilometers away on the horizon, lightning strikes from a storm illuminated the night sky and just about every minute a shooting star flew above us. The bright area across the photograph is our Milky Way galaxy, which I had never seen before.

It was with this view that I fell asleep in a swag outside and it was with that view that I woke up before sunrise to continue the hike. Something you will never forget.

I began getting into photography in the middle of the digital camera revolution in the early 2000s. Back when analogue photography was still common, digital photography opened a whole new world of possibilities, mainly because I knew exactly how the photograph looked right after it was taken and could thus play with colors, depth of field, blurring, composition and more.
Since then, my digital photography was always one with relatively little digital editing and alterations.

It was 2013 when I realized that the tiny camera on my new cell phone has incredible image quality and is even able to include esthetic color features as well as dynamic panorama stiching simply on the fly. The results of my experiments with this during a recent trip to Chicago are composed below.

Meanwhile, after a couple of photoshop tutorials I also realized that manipulating the content of photos (not just colors) has become so easy and accessible. Combining new camera features and software continues to open yet more and more gates to endless possibilities of photographic creativity with millions of people being able to join in and exhibit their great work to the world.

Does that make it easier or harder than before to achieve outstanding artistic work? I leave this question to you without an answer, as I yet need to find out myself.

It was in fall of 2007. I had only recently moved to Paris for a year of university abroad and had discovered a university photography association which I gladly joined. The concept of the weekly meetings was, each of the 3-6 people that joined brought a couple of photographs either dealing with a certain assigned topic or whatever he/she saw fit. The classes were informal and heavily based on critisicing the artist.
At that time, I was more convinced about the value of my photography much more than I am actually now. I usually had around five photographs on a USB stick with me and we huddled around an old computer screen to discuss them. One afternoon, as I brought in five pictures on a USB stick that I was rather proud of, I got very heavily criticised about my selection for a good. It was painful and I had a hard time understanding why it seemed like everything I showed sucked.

The realisation came later: Whenever you show more than one photograph, each image stands in the context of the rest.

Since I started this website in 2009, I have mostly avoided displaying photographs with very personal content, avoided to specify clearly where the picture was taken, when it was taken and even the date I wrote the article. Why? Because I either wanted to abstract the image and emphasize on the general thoughts of the article or simply display what I define to be art in my photography. The problem is, that this also sets bounds to what I share with the world. It is time to once again crack these walls I set up because ideas evolve and photography needs to breathe fresh air.

While browsing through pictures of a recent holiday to Italy I stumbled upon the photograph you see above. It is uncropped and virtually unedited. It was taken just before a gorgeous sunset over the Swiss alps after a long day of driving to Lake Como at the Italy-Swiss border. We were alone, bought two beers at a shop and sat down at café that had already closed. I got up to capture the beauty of the scene and took several photos. I also took a step back, asked my girlfriend to turn around and as she did the mirror of my DSLR flipped up, capturing one of the final instances of our vacation.

Later I realized that this picture is the only one that in my sentiment transmits the beauty and feel of the scene that I felt because its not abstract but instead very personal. Its the context that makes the picture and not just the elements in the composition! The picture is unrefined, simple and does not match with most of my photographs I most appreciate. Still it is my favorite picture from this trip because what it captured is a marvelous unique snapshot of our lives that will live on as we grow older.

Click here or on the image below to view four images and a short article about a series of pictures I took in 2010. It’s the only time I ever went our shooting in the city of Munich and came back satisfying results. It raises the question of where inspiration comes from, but that is another topic. Enjoy!